Inside the Minnesota courtroom, the pace of Republican Norm Coleman’s election case picked up Thursday. Outside the courtroom, his lawyer’s criticism of the trial judges’ decision showed no sign of slacking.

After weeks of slow-moving testimony from local elections officials about hundreds of ballots, the Coleman campaign dashed through testimony.

“I want to congratulate the parties for getting through nine and a half election jurisdictions,” said Judge Denise Reilly, one of the three members of the election trial’s judicial panel, at the end of the day. The half jurisdiction was from Pamela Fuller from Olmsted County, who had started her testimony Wednesday.

Reilly’s congratulations might not have been so hearty had she heard Coleman attorney Ben Ginsberg’s continued complaints outside the courtroom.

For the past several days, Ginsberg has said that when the three-judge panel ruled last week that more than a dozen categories of absentee ballots were illegal, they also made illegal hundreds of absentee ballots that already have been counted.

“At the end of the day, this court will face a conundrum — having to certify the number of legally cast votes when we see the evidence each and every day that, in fact, there are illegal votes included in the count,” he said.

It’s a claim the Coleman legal team has made before — and the judges have shot it down.

Earlier this week, Coleman’s attorneys asked the judges to move toward reconsidering the order. The judges said they would not.

Despite the judges’ refusal to retread that ground, the Coleman public relations effort has not abated.

On Thursday, Ginsberg gave reporters lists showing that counties and cities rejected absentee ballots because witnesses were not registered to vote — something the three judges said last week was necessary — at vastly different rates.

He said that means many already-counted absentee ballots had unregistered witnesses yet were included in the count. Based on the judges’ ruling, those already counted ballots would be illegally cast.

“There are more illegal votes in the current count than the margin in this race,” Ginsberg said.

Democrat Al Franken has a 225-vote lead. Even before the judges’ ruling and the claim of illegal votes, Coleman has dismissed that lead as “artificial.”

The increased disparagement from the Coleman legal team comes as the number of absentee ballots they have brought before the court has decreased.

The centerpiece of Coleman’s case to overturn Franken’s lead has been the idea that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of uncounted but valid absentee votes. Originally, his lawyers had asked the court to consider counting 11,000 absentee ballots.

Since then, through a series of decisions, the judges have narrowed the scope — in both number and in type — of absentee ballots Coleman can bring before them. There are perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 of his original 11,000 left on the table.

As a practical matter, that means the court has arrived at the “streamlining” all involved in the month-old trial have said they wanted.

It means that rather than needing to read more than 100 absentee ballots into the record from Minnetonka, for instance, Coleman’s lawyers introduced about a tenth of that number Thursday when the city’s clerk, David Madea, was on the stand.

Testimony by auditors from Steele, Meeker, Lyon and Cass counties and clerks in the cities of Eden Prairie, Champlin, Bloomington and Edina was dispatched with similar alacrity.

“Everybody was wildly in favor of speeding it up,” Ginsberg said.

While the elections officials were on the stand, Coleman attorney Joe Friedberg asked them questions to build Coleman’s case that different governments handle absentee ballots differently.

Do you check whether the absentee ballots’ witnesses are registered voters, he asked them. Some do, some don’t and some do sometimes, he was told.

How do you handle it when the signature on the absentee ballot envelope doesn’t match the signature on an absentee ballot application? Some counties call every voter and invite the voter to re-sign, some assume the same voter signed both, and others do something else.

The judges essentially said in an order late Wednesday that they could live with those differences.

“It is irrelevant whether there were irregularities between the counties applying (the law) prior to this election contest,” they wrote.

When Franken attorneys questioned the witnesses, many of their questions were designed to build a starkly different case: that Minnesota elections officials are experienced, well-trained and very, very careful.

After Coleman is done with his case, Franken can air his counterclaims more fully. Like Coleman, the Democrat believes there are uncounted absentee ballots that should be included in the race’s tally.

Rachel E. Stassen-Berger was a Minnesota Capitol reporter for the Pioneer Press from 2001 to 2009 and again from 2015 to 2017.

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